Amplified Humanity and the Architectural Criminal

Stills from the video evidence captured by Ethman Ag Mohamed Ethman for Sahara Media, used as evidence by the International Criminal Court.

Over the past twelve months, two international initiatives have been closely watched because they appear to set the terms for a new, globally punishable, architectural criminality. The Italian-Jordanian initiative Protecting Cultural Heritage: An imperative for humanity mobilized the UN, Interpol, and UNESCO to stem the looting and smuggling of antiquities out of war-torn Syria by demonstrating that their traffic “finances terrorism” and is “linked to international crime.”1 At the same time, the International Criminal Court of the Hague tried and indicted Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, a Malian citizen who orchestrated the destruction of ten mausoleums and mosques in Timbuktu on behalf of Ansar Dine (an affiliate of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Magrheb, AQIM) in the broadest-ever judicial ruling that architectural destruction is punishable as a war crime.2

These two projects promise to bridge two notions, “heritage” and “humanity,” that have been separated in international law for at least a hundred years.3 Legally, the bifurcation can be traced to the aftermath of World War II. Since the 1954 Hague Convention, heritage laws have protected architecture as a kind of collective property, whereas texts such as the 1948 Human Rights Declaration codified humanity as an attribute of individual personhood. Any reference to cultural heritage was deliberately excluded from the 1948 Genocide Convention, signed that same year.

But historically, the split predates these laws. World War I was the first conflict where modern nation-states competed and collaborated to protect their art and architecture. In fact, these protective measures were so well-publicized that after 1918 Europe’s cultural elite became consumed with debates about whether armies had been more concerned with their art than with their citizens. Fearing that humans and things might have to compete for protection in future wars, international lawyers found themselves split for much of the twentieth century in an apparent opposition: advocate either for culture or for human rights.4

Fast-forward to September 2016. The ICC’s judgment against Al Mahdi explicitly seeks to move past this split legacy. “Crimes against property are generally of less gravity than crimes against persons,” states the ICC Chamber, but this particular attack was “heightened by the fact that it was relayed in the media”—that is, it was amplified by its consequences for the international community.5

So if protecting heritage has become an “imperative for humanity,” it is by undermining the early-modern and Enlightenment definition of the human as distinct both from things that are less than human (such as barbarians, animals, or inanimate objects) and also those that are more than human (such as gods).6 At the ICC trial, the religious aspects of destruction took a notable back seat, while its technical and material logistics, and the nature of Timbuktu’s mosques and mausoleums as “living” heritage, were emphasized.

To be sure, tensions lie just beneath the surface of the apparent consensus that the Al Mahdi case is ground-breaking. Critics point out that Al Mahdi’s confession and cooperation with the court means that the case sets no new evidentiary standards.7 Human rights advocates worry that a victory in punishing violence against buildings might obscure crimes against persons, including the widespread sexual violence committed by the very same group, during the very same period and in the same urban spaces of Timbuktu. The Malian association for Human Rights and Amnesty International have both called for “an expansion of the charges” against Al Mahdi.8 The stakes of punishing architectural destruction are therefore clear: is it a proxy for exposing more pervasive but more invisible human rights abuses, ones whose victims are chosen for their collective identity but targeted as individuals, living in a city under siege.

René Caillié, View of the City of Timbuctoo From English Translation of René Caillé, Voyage à Tombouctoo. Translated as Travels Through Central Africa to Timbuctoo, and Across the Great Desert, to Morocco, Performed in the Years 1824-1828. 2 vols. London, 1830. Gift of C. W. McAlpin, Class of 1888. [Rare Books Division]

If the relationship between heritage and humanity has been reconfigured from an opposition to one of proximity, what are the architectural terms of this proximity? What are the operations through which the “expansion,” or “widening” of crime and punishment alike are imagined? In this essay I probe these questions in two parts. First, the accused’s discourse, in court and in abundant video evidence, provides an entry point into the logic of sincerity that motivated the design of the destruction of Timbuktu. Second, an analysis of the practices that authenticate Timbuktu as an international treasure—both in court and in ongoing preservation—reveal the techniques of amplification that are embedded into the built environment to hold together an agreement, on both sides of the law, that the target of this new criminality is humanity itself.

Philippe Desmazes, Photograph of the Minaret of the Great Mosque in Timbujtu, date unknown. Detail. Photo: Getty Images.

Life on the Architectural Surface

Heritage and humanity are becoming proximate notions under the sign of a dialogue, or negative mirroring, between the ideologies of Western humanitarianism and global jihad. In his remarkable book The Terrorist in Search of Humanity, historian Faisal Devji shows the confounding parallels between the structure and functioning of these two movements: both operate through widely distributed networks whose end-game is non-governmental, who claim to occupy a privileged place of morality, and who recruit young and idealistic individuals “in search of humanity.”9

Devji’s work is informed by Hannah Arendt’s 1957 definition of humanity as produced through “negative solidarity, based on the fear or global destruction.”10 in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968).] Arendt proclaimed that humanity had “become an urgent reality,” but one realized only in the face of the possibility for total extinction. Devji argues that something resembling this negative solidarity animates the suicide bombers of Al Qaeda for whom the “globe” (al-alam) can be unified only at the moment when it is left behind. To be sure, there is a difference in the two sides of Devji’s comparison: the search for empathy leads humanitarian workers to seek out sites of bare life, whereas the jihadist’s path culminates in sacrificial suicide. But two of Devji’s lessons are clear: first, assuming that Western humanitarianism is modern and secular while the Islamic militant project is fundamentalist and anti-modern only obscures the analysis of both, and second, destruction plays a crucial role in humanity’s coalescence.

Because Devji relies on Arendt, he already offers us a way of thinking of humanity and heritage laws as historically proximate. If a new humanity coalesced in the face of mid-century mass-murder, so too was the notion of international heritage worked out in response to massive scenarios of destruction during the tumultuous decades before its codification in the 1972 World Heritage Convention.11

Furthermore, Devji has updated his analysis to encompass the rise of the Islamic State, describing how, against the commonly assumed rift between modern superficiality and traditionalist depth, IS recruits are asked to live what he calls “a life on the surface.”12 “Efforts to explain terrorism tend to be structured as efforts to plumb the movement’s depth,” he writes, but in fact most recruits obey “banal forms of reasoning” that explicitly mirror the actions of the West, to expose its insincerity. Thus “it is not the content of the West’s actions that is put in question” by militant rhetoric, “but simply its hypocrisy.”

Devji invites us to read destruction looking for the “logic of equivalence that marks militancy.” For Al Qaeda, he cites Vyjayanthi Rao’s reading of the Mumbai bombing as an infrastructural counterpart to the smart bombs of the West.13 For ISIS, he diagnoses a “hatred of all historical, sociological and ideological depth” as motivating the architectural destruction “of pre-Islamic monuments, [and] also of all ‘traditional,’ ‘heretical’ or ‘infidel’ sites.”14

“Relevé de typologies dans le quartier de Sankoré” [Survey of typologies in the Sankoré quarters], published on page 40 of Unesco, Manuel pour la conservation de tombouctou (Unesco: 2014).

Returning to the case of Timbuktu, then, we find destruction that both echoes Al Qaeda’s concerns for global belonging, and constitutes an early example—an experiment, really—of the attacks on funerary structures that the Islamic State would later make systematic, beginning with the invasion of Mosul.15 In Timbuktu, Al Mahdi leveraged both the infrastructural, networked nature of the city, and its nature as a historical root. Additionally, I would like to argue, the attack on the mausoleums and mosques was motivated by an almost superficial reflectivity, a ghostly mirror of the profundity that is assumed to be granted by the West to these locally-revered objects.16

Consider, first, the carefully-timed game of retaliation that motivated the destruction. Ansar Dine monitored the activities of local inhabitants at ten mosques and mausolea for several months, but only ordered their destruction after they were inscribed on UNESCO’s list of heritage under threat in June 2012.17 In October, the group re-started destruction on the eve of an international meeting in Bamako, and in December, it was in response to a UN security resolution to send an occupying force to northern Mali that further “hidden mausoleums in the city” were found and attacked.18 In interviews with the Western press, Ansar Dine spokesperson Sanda Ould Boumama performed this mirroring, asking, “We are Muslims; what is UNESCO?” and continuing, as if to question the moral authority of the West’s cult of monuments, “For us, their indignation is an atonement.”19

Next, consider Al Mahdi himself. A religiously educated member of a Touareg family, he was a teacher of literary Arabic and a schoolmaster by the time he was recruited into Ansar Dine in April 2012, when he took the name Abu Turab and began travelling as an acolyte of Abu Zadine. When the group returned to Timbuktu to occupy the city, Al Mahdi was enlisted to act as local mediator and, given a choice of positions, became the chief of the “morality police,” al-Hesbah. Video footage from this period (captured by a rare embedded journalist) shows him to be living exactly the kind of life on the surface described by Devji: going from his day job teaching Arabic to a child, to donning a special “vice police” jacket on top of his clothes before he sets off on vice patrol.20 This squad is in charge not of beliefs but of mores; not of the content of the Koran but of its respect; not of the rules but of the sincerity with which they are followed.

Following Al Mahdi on his routine as a morality policeman, the camera catches him alternately conducting online research on Koranic law in a session of the local Islamic court, patrolling the streets with Kalshnikov and megaphone in hand, inflicting the first three of a hundred lashes to an adulterous couple in the public square, assisting in the assassination of one of Ansar Dine’s own and leading a group of men in the destruction, by pick-axe, of a number of buildings.

The architectural destruction fits seamlessly into the joint policing of local morality and global sincerity. “We have destroyed these cemeteries as a preventative measure,” Al Mahdi explains at one point, “in order to make sure the people don’t use them as idols.”21 In fact, Al Mahdi is not originally convinced that the mausolea need destroying. But when he is finally pressured to write a radio sermon calling for their destruction, he finds a Koranic verse forbidding any construction higher than an inch on top of a tomb.22

What ensues is a two-week performance of regulating architectural volumes and surfaces through destruction. At stake is the superficiality of the Western notion of heritage “protection,” to which Ansar Dine counter-proposes that it is the globe and its surface that should be the true object of protection, and not have objects built upon it. Thus tombs are sinful protuberations and their razing “brings protection of Sharia of the unicity of God.”23 Destroying buildings creates a place “upon which the law of Allah can now be applied.”24 we are going to rid the landscape of anything that is out of place” Cited in “The prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi,” Public Judgment and Sentence, 27 September 2016, (ICC-01/12-01/15), 20–21. “Un homme remercie Dieu après avoir détruit un tombeau plus protubérant que les autres; un autre qui loue Allah de leur avoir accordé toutes ses victoires et de leur avoir permis d’appliquer Sa Loi sur terre.” “Sahara média accompagne Ançar Edine en train de démolir les mausolées de Tombouctou,” Saharamedia (30 June 2012) →.] Al Mahdi vows to “remove everything that doesn’t belong on the landscape,” as if to prime the surface of the earth for a guest.25 Thinness and superstition are also conflated when the mob arrives at one of Timbuktu’s revered monuments—a sacred door. “There was a legend that if you opened this door it would be the end of the world. We are charged with fighting superstition. This is why we decided to fix the construction of the door.”26 Exposing superficiality, Al Mahdi helps rip out the door by hand to expose a bricked-up, solid wall.27

One of the more remarkable allocutions of Al Mahdi’s destructive rationale comes retroactively, in court, when the presiding judge inquires about the sincerity of his remorse and asks whether he has had to renounce his religious belief to plead guilty. Instead, Al Mahdi notes that this is not his first, but his second change of heart, thereby assuring the court that he had simply learned to live with “the contradiction that the mausoleums represented.”28 To be sure, this represents a betrayal of Al Qaeda’s sacrificial quest, but it also retroactively confirms that this sacrifice was originally demanded in the name not of a historically-grounded tradition but rather to publicize (and destroy) modern hypocrisy.

In court, Al Mahdi himself takes on qualities of an architectural mediator. He is tried not only as the “author” of destruction but as a “media spokesperson,” for his design of a sequence for the destruction. He is charged with “heightening the suffering” of Timbuktu’s population by allowing “armed groups to reach and thus to victimize a broader audience.”29 His choice of destruction techniques (instead of a bulldozer he purchases pick axes, which distribute the destructive tasks) also confers mediatic properties to his mob: they transmit ideology through their actions.30

But if AQIM relies on Al Mahdi as a local connector for implanting itself in Timbuktu, the ICC equally requires him to use his own personhood to depict an expanded field of applicability for international law. The same qualities that Al Mahdi offered to the terrorist network are fully exploited by the ICC: he is a person who can “expand” his identity and belonging concentrically. This is particularly evident in the way Al Mahdi structures his guilty plea, in a statement that repeats atonement in a scalar progression from local brotherhood, to national citizenship, to global humanity:

I am sorry. I am really remorseful and I regret all the damage that my actions have caused to my family. And to my brothers in Timbuktu. And to my home country, the nation of Mali, in general. And to the whole of humanity around the world.31 (al bashariyyati jamaa fi anha' al alam)

When Al Mahdi uses the word “humanity,” he evokes a ribbon of persons across the globe. But the French and English translations (both in court and in official transcripts) replace this with “international community,” taking advantage of the discursive structure that is shared between humanitarian activism and Islamic jihad.32 Indeed, even if Al Mahdi’s language is far more colorful than its translations, it conveys a struggle with superficiality. He speaks of being “swept up” in an “intense whirlwind,” but argues that despite this destructive force the “deep historical roots (al jothoor al amiqa) of the city of Timbuktu and its inhabitants” cannot be erased. The court translators substitute “root” with “heritage,” and “whirlwind” with “evil wave … of deviant people.” But these substitutions are altogether seamless, because Al Mahdi is one of the few people who can make these linguistic substitutions possible. From an anonymous official, he becomes throughout the trial a crucial operand, who can perform the scalar shift from personal brotherhood to global humanity that is consistent both with the imagined territory of humanitarian law and with the global surface of jihad.

What, then, about heritage practices that were called upon to remediate Al Mahdi’s cultural vandalism? Devji’s concept of “life on the surface” helps to locate the criminalization of architectural destruction within humanitarianism as a privileged vector of moral sincerity in the West, as well as within terrorism and its publicity goals. What is the relationship between this dynamic and the international preservation community, with its well-known preoccupation with integrity and authenticity? Here too the answer lies less in the symbolic weight of Timbuktu’s architecture than in the technologies of protection that have been used to manage its decay, its destruction, and now its reconstruction.

When old Ontologies Were New

Two conceptions of heritage were brought to trial in the Hague. The first associates architectural objects with depth and fundament. It offers a vision of heritage as local, situated, and connects the architecture of the buildings to the earth itself. The prosecutor in Al Mahdi’s case, Fatou Bensouda, adopted this view in her opening statement. She invoked the “deep connection between the mausoleums and the inhabitants,” called the destroyed buildings “roots of an entire people” and “important foundational blocks” for the city’s life and recalled their “inherent” or “intrinsic value” which “once destroyed, restoration can never bring back.”33 For her, Timbuktu was targeted as an emblem of cultural diversity, a union of human and material tolerance that was dissolved as soon as “authentic materials [were] destroyed.”34 She further functionalized this architectural ontology in her legal argument, by resorting to the doctrine of military objective (which objectifies the built environment by classifying all buildings as either civilian or military.)35

This argument is entirely in keeping with prevalent international preservation theories that the gap between heritage and humanity can only ever be bridged by a deep essentialism of place. “In order to maintain its authenticity and truthfulness,” Jukka Jokilehto writes, “space must be alive.” Any local community “produces” space through dwelling, and therefore all spatial history (“inheritances,” in this language) is necessarily local, while any contact with a “globalizing world society” provokes an uprooting.36 What is lost in destruction, therefore, is architecture’s inherent sincerity.37

But the material continuities that apparently authenticate these historical lineages are hard to trace. Thus a second view of heritage extends a testimonial power to buildings and affords more room for historical and material ruptures. Here, Bensouda appealed to the continued “memory” of these buildings in several generations, as “living testimony to Timbuktu's glorious past… a unique testament to the city's urban settlements.”38 One step removed from ontological dwelling, this chain of communication proceeds through history witness by witness.

In fact, Bensouda also speaks of the mausoleums as media of amplification, and of herself as a transmitter. “It is the voice of the mausoleums, of monuments, which ring out like a bell through my voice … a voice that brings with it echoes for its audience, of hatred or violence or anger.” Bensouda—who has been applauded for her willingness to leverage the “symbolic power” of the ICC—repeats this amplification in her concluding statement giving weight to the judge’s ruling in a scalar concentricity. “Your judgment is awaited from the ancient streets of Timbuktu and throughout Mali to all four corners of the world.”39

It is this media-enabled, amplified humanity (and not a fundamentalist architectural essence) that the judge ultimately designates as the victim of Al Mahdi’s crime. In the final judgment, the court refuses to accept either the “religious nature” or the “high-profile quality” of the attack as an “aggravating circumstance.” Instead, the “far-reaching nature” of the crime is essential to the fact it is aimed at “multiple victims.”40 The gravity of the crime is measured spatially but indirectly, with the idea that international humanity is a mediated, amplified multiple of the local inhabitant.

How did the heritage experts who helped rebuild Timbuktu beginning in 2013 take up this challenge of reconciling essentialism and mediality? It was not in fact difficult. Their task was facilitated by pre-existing efforts to bring techno-scientific building practices to bear on a primarily artisanal building tradition. Consider a Manual for the conservation of Timbuktu, published in 2014 to herald the cultural rebirth of the city, but based on research conducted by Italian architects and archaeologists between 2002 and 2006 to protect the city from climate change. The manual depicts the city as a natural product of the “constructive culture of earth.”41 Yet the conservation techniques prescribed in this manual are almost exclusively drainage practices that control the external surfaces of the city’s vernacular construction. One section through a typical city street shows a Touareg scale figure surrounded by meticulously layered, paving and walls. Another shows how to protect the joint between earth and building from water infiltration. Another embeds toilet plumbing inside banco walls. From the care given to these technical images, a casual reader of this manual would be forgiven for thinking that the world-heritage status of Timbuktu pertains only to the thinnest of its outer layers.

But international expertise is concentrated on these surface details for good reason: because the more tectonic aspects of building are delegated to a local community of masons who have for generations, we are told, conserved the city through embodied building know-how.42 They use earth to make either rounded or rectangular earth bricks; they also re-plaster outer walls periodically by hand using sand and water. The material link between these masons and the “earth” out of which they build their architecture is a human, trans-generation apprenticeship, itself designated as intangible heritage under threat.

Implicitly, then, the reasons for this ecological intervention in Timbuktu’s architecture are aesthetic: together climate change and declining know-how have conspired to undermine the objecthood and legibility of Timbuktu. Increased rains mean that water stagnates in the cityscape, and earthen walls are not able to dry through natural evaporation, especially as sand piles surrounding outer walls give water a place to collect and walls rot from within. Masons have responded to the increasing frailty of their architecture by using hybrid building techniques, such as using adding cement to adobe, CMUs and banco bricks, or shoring up failing walls with banco buttresses that jut out into streets. These new practices create an increasingly pile-ridden, formless, ill-defined urban streetscape.43 In other words, the guardians of World Heritage find themselves policing Timbuktu’s masons by constraining their work so that it may only result in sharply outlined, monolithic, objects.

All of these aspects of the thick-thin theory of Timbuktese earthen architecture have made their reappearance in the UNESCO-sponsored reconstruction of Timbuktu’s mausoleums, but the contradiction between depth and surface has now been reconfigured. While ecological disaster seemed to call forth nostalgia for a disappearing tradition, the threat of terrorist destruction makes architecture a medium for the transmitting of a newly construed humanity. In the ICC trial the masons appear as “living human treasures” and, by publishing this manual in 2014, UNESCO makes clear that the goal of reconstruction is in part to give them something to build.44 Through its reconstruction, Timbuktu is now defined as the medial support for the transmission of know-how, not the other way around.

After all, Al Mahdi had intervened in the city’s medial landscape with his megaphone and his laptop as much as with his pick-axe and his Kalashnikov.45 The contest for defining the global “human” continues now, as international institutions continue to publicize their involvement in Timbuktu, keeping its architecture alive by circulating it on networks of communication.46

After the destruction and reconstruction of its mausoleums, Timbuktu’s architectural history becomes a media archaeology, one which may help get past the pitfalls of colonialist histories. After all, the inaugural definition of Timbuktu as a place of protuberations was colonial. Robert Caillié’s famous engraving of the “city of 333 saints,” still reproduced in heritage manuals today, saw religious diversification literally materialized in a proliferation of buildings.47 Facsimile (Paris: La Découverte, 1996).] Now, instead, the original context in which Timbuktu will take its architectural significance is that of a network of pilgrimage, commerce, and tourism both real and virtual. In the words of the court, Timbuktu was the “protective heart” of Mali’s heritage because it has been a focal point of cultural mobility since the middle ages.48 And with protection now understood to be the original function of Timbuktu’s destroyed mausoleums, their reconstruction can be seamlessly integrated to their history.49

Timbuktu’s architectural history as a protective shield has not been interrupted by the destructions of 2012; rather it has been increasingly materialized. The city was already mediatized when technologies of communication were embedded in its urban architecture and its landmarks.50 In the 1990s, the Djingareiber Mosque was wired and loudspeakers were lodged among its dome’s distinctive wooden stakes. Between 2002 and 2006, Timbuktu’s urban fabric was surveyed through plans that encircled buildings with markers signifying the positions of photographers. After their destruction, the rebuilt mausoleums have been inventoried not through simple photography but with data-rich photogrammetric scans, with a ghostly scale figure digitally added in. UNESCO hopes that reconstruction will reclaim the warscape the city had become under Ansar Dine, through new acts of medial-architectural presencing.51 For example, when masons climb atop mosque towers during their yearly “ritual maintenance event” and pose for a publicity shot, the architectural festival itself is not new, but it is has now become a performance of retracing, reproduction, that takes place on the very surface of what colonial visitors called “a noble pile.”52 Photographic surveying and participatory masonry have created a new standard for authenticity, where geometric exactitude recedes and live approximation triumphs.53

Central structure of Askias Tomb in Gao, Mail, originally built in the 15th Century. Top during a colonial visit in the early 20th Century; Bottom: photographed during a maintenance festival in July 2014, sponsored by a number of international agencies.

The Lure of Evidence

From a place for the multiplication of saints, Timbuktu has become the site for an amplification of humanity. It is undoubtedly this power of amplification that prosecutors and activists are hoping to avail themselves today to activate the proximity of heritage and humanity. When heritage advocates argue, after Raphael Lemkin, that cultural destruction tends to precede human violence; that vandalism must be prosecuted to “signal” that no other violence will be tolerated—it is because violence against heritage and humanity circulate by the same means.54 But even when it occurs in the same place, the broadening of heritage into humanity is mediated. This is why architectural forensics is an urgent issue, and its practitioners are keenly attuned to the evolution of new media.55

Yet when architectural evidence is brought to the Hague, the argument that heritage and humanity are united by collective identity, by dignity cemented through dwelling, is not sufficient. The architects’ cameras that penetrated Timbuktu’s interiors in the 2000s to survey its urban fabric, could not produce evidence of the sexual crimes that those same walls may have witnessed in 2012. On today’s international stage, any ontology will be tested against an evolving definition of humanity as fueled by “negative solidarity.” The architectural criminal mirrors the morality claims of the humanitarian, including those of her evidentiary regimes. After all, when the Court attempted to penetrate Al Mahdi’s internal life, he performed an outward extension of personhood instead.

×

Superhumanity, a project by e-flux Architecture at the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial, is produced in cooperation with the Istanbul Design Biennial, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand, and the Ernst Schering Foundation.

Lucia Allais is an architectural historian and theorist who teaches at Princeton University, a member of Aggregate, and an editor of Grey Room.

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A female Aedes aegypti remains in suspended pregnancy until she ingests vertebrate blood. With hundreds of eggs in her ovaries, she begins a search for carbon dioxide and heat. Once detected, she lands on her host to penetrate the epidermis with her proboscis and deposit saliva, which as an anti-coagulant, ensures...

The rise of right-wing populist, anti-liberal, and authoritarian political alternatives has brought a renewed attention to architecture. In opposition to broad sections of the German architecture community and construction industry, for whom an “open-arms” culture represents a kind of ethically precious incentive, apocalyptics and integrationists are manufacturing rightist spaces based on increasingly solidified ideological patterns. The German right-wing publisher Götz Kubitschek uses the...

Anthropogeny is the study of human origins, of how something that was not quite human becomes human. It considers what enables and curtails us today: tool-making and prehensile grasp, the pre-frontal cortex and abstraction, figuration and war, mastering fire and culinary chemistry, plastics and metals, the philosophical paths to agricultural urbanism and more. 1 Given that Darwinian biology and Huttonian geology are such new perspectives, we may say that Anthropogeny, in any kind of...

It was 2016, and the scales of territories, cities, buildings, animals, plants and human started to simultaneously expand and contract. Proximity and narrative became the matter. So we decide to retreat and prepare for the usual post-apocalyptic era.
Entry 2316.018, Mardin
I turned onto my side to face the dark red sun peering through the sand-covered window. It’s been a long time since I've seen another human being. The city was ruined during the war, to the point where it’s...

Pale light could be seen coming from gaps in a large, low building. A simple clarity had been disturbed. True size was hard to read. The function of this place was hard to define. The surrounding landscape held no markers or signs. Nothing stood close by in order to provide scale. The mass refused to reveal itself. Cuts in the facade were troubling and extreme. Great tears and raw holes had broken through a thin metal skin, yet the basic framework remained. A view through the cuts revealed...

Anton Vidokle: When Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley (the curators of the Istanbul Design Biennial) told me the subject of the show—the question “Are We Human?”—I immediately thought of the writings of Nikolai Fedorov and other Russian Bio-Cosmists, and their ideas about the unfinished state of human evolution.
Cosmism is a little known intellectual and artistic movement that arose in Russia towards the end of the nineteenth century. At its base is a philosophy of immortality and...

Chapter 1
As I scan the fields below I see her, in the corner of my lens. She is playing below, in a town I have never heard of, in a place I will never visit. It is 2pm on a Tuesday.
I am on a long mission that launched back in World War I, and I am still flying. I look down on the world. I am unmanned. I am operated, I am programmed and subject to your motivations I drift across voyeurism, horror and wonder. What I choose to focus on defines who you are, and in the glass of...

1. Cognitive Automation and Engineering of the Self
“Observing his subatomic self … no chronology was stable.”
—Jonathan Franzen, Purity
“A knower, whatever name one may want to call it, self experiencer, protagonist, needs to be generated in the brain if the mind is to become conscious. When the brain manages to introduce a knower in the mind, subjectivity follows.”
—Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind
Contemporary technological development tends to move towards...

Creative Destruction and Cybernetic History
I saw the future. It was empty.
A clean slate, flat, designed through and through.
In his 1963 film “How to Kill People” designer George Nelson argues that killing is a matter of design, next to fashion and homemaking. Nelson states that design is crucial in improving both the form and function of weapons. It deploys aesthetics to improve lethal technology.
An accelerated version of the design of killing recently went on trial...

My question is not “What is a human being?” but a smaller question, one that isn’t frequently asked but one that turns out to be important to understand the significance of the larger one. This question is this: do human beings always recognize other human beings as human beings? A special case of this would be: do human beings always recognize themselves as human beings? If they do, what are the means of recognition? One reason for asking the question is because of the way in which violence...

In the first three months of 2016, the number of wealthy Chinese couples hiring fertility and surrogacy gestation services at US-based clinics grew by 260%. 1 Many fertility clinics based in the United States admit that Chinese nationals already constituted 40% of their clientele. This surge was in part a rapid reaction to the end of China’s one-child reproductive policy. 2 Due to the effects of long-term exposure to environmental pollution, many surrogacies requires couples to receive...

There was a period shortly before the third end when a group of mechatronic engineers were incredibly productive. It didn’t last long, but we managed to build a new Copperland, brick by brick, from the basalt rocks formed by rapid cooling solar flares. Mechatronic Systems Science Programs created new devices for communication without cell phones that emit radiofrequencies. Our Incident Update Office transformed crime-prediction algorithms into crime-prevention algorithms and abolished all...

In 1986, during a flight over southwest Amazonia, the geographer Alceu Ranzi noticed a huge geometric earthwork cut through the middle of a vast tract of deforested land. From the ground, the structure was nearly imperceptible, as it mingled with the environment like a natural topographic feature, but from the vantage point of the aircraft, its precise architectural plan was clearly distinguishable as an engineered inscription on the surface of the earth. Ranzi recognized that the “geoglyph”...

If to err is human, to design corrective systems is all the more so. When in 1962 Ivan Sutherland designed the first drafting program that would allow us, amongst other things, to draw better circles, he was in many ways simply providing an update to Leon Battista Alberti’s circle-drawing system issued some five hundred years earlier in De Pictura . Crucially, in both, one does not have to be able to draw a circle to draw a circle . Sutherland, under Claude Shannon’s wily guidance,...

Over the past twelve months, two international initiatives have been closely watched because they appear to set the terms for a new, globally punishable, architectural criminality. The Italian-Jordanian initiative Protecting Cultural Heritage: An imperative for humanity mobilized the UN, Interpol, and UNESCO to stem the looting and smuggling of antiquities out of war-torn Syria by demonstrating that their traffic “finances terrorism” and is “linked to international crime.” 1 At the same...

It’s just been scientifically proven that ducks have abstract thinking. 1 The discovery neither alters nor surprises ducks, since they’ve known this fact, since they are ducks. The discovery just reveals that we, non-ducks, are deeply fascinated by sharing traits that are relevant to our idea of rationality with ducks. If taken really seriously, the discovery is a revolution, marking, in a very nice, duckish way, the impossibility of taking the premises of humanism and humanists seriously....

If you spot a “throbber,” you’ve probably got an issue with your hardware. These small digital animations, more commonly known as buffer icons, only appear when your internet connection or browser speed is too slow to manage the volume of incoming data. In the 1990s almost every webpage used to buffer before it loaded; the old Netscape throbber (depicting a meteor shower over a hilltop) was practically the unofficial logo of the World Wide Web for many years. These days you will only see a...

The 1990s were dominated by debates about postmodernism, one strand of which was concerned with the so called “aestheticization of the life world.” Wolfgang Welsch, for example, wrote in Grenzgänge der Ästhetik , “The facades get prettier, the shops more animated, the noses more perfect. But such aestheticization reaches deeper, it affects fundamental structures of reality as such.” 1 For aestheticization means “basically that the non-aesthetic is made aesthetic or is grasped as being...

"There are no depths. Appearance is the summary of phenomena."
—Joseph Brodsky
Life on Earth is a narrative written by the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). The chemical design of DNA is uniform among every form of life, but its sequence is different between species and individuals. DNA sequences are comprised of millions of differentially combined chemical letters (A, T, C & G) and yield most of the current diversity of species, as well as offering an endless blueprint for the...

Per Frederick Kiesler, design is born from a crocodile—a reptile caged inside the architect’s genealogical table alongside a solitary piece of metal. 1 Were it not for the vertical line dividing the two figures, one could picture the crocodile snapping the hard rock with its open jaws and swallowing, slowly but steadily, the large mineral specimen. Design, Kiesler implies, is born by the omnivorous appetite of animal beings seeking to assimilate the most indigestible things, including...

1
I saw the white light through the monitor of my mobile phone—a burst of white light that spread from the upper-left corner of the frame the moment the surveillance camera at Istanbul’s Atatürk airport captured the detonation of the suicide bomb—and this fleeting white light meant that some people’s lives had been cruelly taken from them without any warning.
This was neither the first nor the last time a suicide bomber would strike against innocent people in a modern public space,...

The New Old Gentry
Housing is meant to make our lives more comfortable from the outside. Besides walls that protect us from hostile circumstances, we have equipped the interior with an accumulation of tools and devices. To be spoiled by all those belongings has only been followed by even more things. Digitalization marked a shift in the minimalism of interior design; while it was first about shrinking, smoothing, and hiding those tools and devices, 3D printing and the Cloud enable us to...

“Are we human?” 1 A possible way to answer this question is to ask someone who is not human. So let me ask a “replicant.” This, you may recall, was the name given to the nonhuman figures in the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner (1982), adapted from Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 2 The replicant was a robot that understood humans well. A sophisticated type of android, it fulfilled a series of literary dreams and cinematic fantasies: the desire to “replicate”...

There is something elusive about the term “design.” English dictionaries tell us the word comes from French, French dictionaries point to an Italian origin ( disegno , drawing), but modern Italian uses the English word “design.” French and German have also adopted the English term, while Spanish prefers diseño . Most cultures, it seems, project the idea of design into the sphere of international English and the cool modernity it represents.
In these languages “design” has several...

One morning, while a man busied himself opening his shop, Design and Accident entered into a conversation.
Design proclaimed: “I have created humans; humans differ from others because of me; I shape their minds and lives. Their families, friends, gods, religions, organizations, communities and nations are me; their homes, schools, factories, temples, cities and graveyards are nothing but me; there is no human universe without me; I am what they eat, wear and think; I create sense in...

I
You burn me
—Sappho, addressing passion
A song from my childhood, by Fairuz, Lebanon’s most famous singer, goes like this:
I wish
You and I were in a house
A house the furthest house
Erased behind the frontiers of darkness and wind
And snow falling, wounding the surface of all things,
Making you lose your way, so that you would never leave,
And you would remain,
Next to me you would remain,
While a thousand season of jasmine would blossom, and...

I was thinking of a book, but I didn’t like that idea.
—Marcel Duchamp 1
Posthumous books are published, why not a posthumous show?
—Philippe Parreno 2
Can an exhibition be a productive medium for thinking through , and not just a kind of pedagogical illustration of extant ideas? Certainly there have been works of literature, art, and music with such magnificent ambitions, and intellectuals who have attempted to articulate the philosophy of, say, the novel,...

As of September 2016, “Brangelina” was no more.
That most super-famous of celebrity portmanteaus—Brad + Angelina—which began in 2005, during the pre-social media age, ended eleven years later, in a feverish hysteria of cruel/funny Twitter/Facebook memes. 1 This supercouple, who had surrendered their individual identities to become a clickbait-friendly brand (worth an alleged $400 million), were breaking apart. And there was nothing any of us could do about it. Some of us...

If I am not drowned or killed trying to escape in the next few days, I hope to write two books. I shall entitle them Apology for Survivors and Tribute to Malthus.
—Adolfo Bioy Casares 1
Addressing politics in the Anthropocene, Jodi Dean identifies three possible roles for humans: observers, victims, and survivors. 2 Her analysis of these differing human trajectories exists within a clear Darwinian perspective of the world. The division of humans into passive victims, active...

In 1936, the equation wasn’t yet common knowledge and it was still decades before you could look things up on a search engine. 1 If you forgot something or had a gap in your understanding, sometimes you still needed to “phone a friend.” The best and most efficient design for information retrieval still required you to know people who knew things. Isamu Noguchi wired his friend Buckminster Fuller, an admirer of Einstein, to ask if he knew it. 2
Fuller’s reply to Noguchi—a...

Man is alone, desperately scraping out the music of his own skeleton, without father, mother, family, love, god or society. And no living being to accompany him. And the skeleton is not of bone, but of skin, like a skin that walks.
—Antonin Artaud 1
“Black” and “white” signify their own arbitrariness, and are a deliberate way of maintaining and affirming a kind of colour-blindness. When I name myself or another as “black”, I mean “one whom others regard as “black”. I could not use...

Some twenty years ago, the effects of an expanding regime of design were starting to be felt in the field of contemporary art. Increasingly, designers seemed to use art contexts as platforms for non-pragmatic reflection and expression. Increasingly, design was also becoming a catalyst in so-called "social" art practices, artistic efforts to engineer or test drive new social and/or economic relations. In the work of collectives like Superflex or Atelier van Lieshout, for instance, design was...

When Aristophanes was summoned in Plato’s symposium to speak of eros ( έρως ), he reverted to the root of human nature, the bodily reality of three sexes: male, female and the vanished malefemale ( αρσενικοθήλυκο ). 1 The latter was the strongest and fastest of all, combining both male and female attributes. Its appearance was whole and round with four hands and legs, two faces, and a back on all sides. The creature was not erect and would never stand vertical to the earth. It did not...

The first and sometimes last thing an architect designs is himself. Andrea Palladio was born Andrea Di Petro della Gondola in 1508, and only became "Palladio" in 1538. The new name—concocted out of Pallas Athene , the goddess of wisdom and the name of a character in a play by Palladio’s patron, Gian Giorgio Trissino—designated Andrea as a master of languages, of both humanism and architecture. John Swan is the forgotten son of a mason, but also the moderately known architect John Soan, as...

Self-directed Exit Education
They called me a ‘snob,’ which, obviously, left me overjoyed. I was inventing culture for myself, and at the same time inventing a character and a personality.
—Didier Eribon 1
In Returning to Reims , a 2009 autosociographic account of class flight and proletarian self-hatred, French philosopher Didier Eribon, author of a well-known biography on Michel Foucault and several books on la question gay , emphasizes the role of autodidacticism...

Field Note Excerpt I: By Invitation Only
Harvard Medical School (Boston, Massachusetts, USA), May 10, 2016.
Anticipation was in the air. Old friends, new acquaintances, and profitable collaborations. “History is being made,” said one speaker after another. History and synthetic genomes.
I did not realize until sitting at the airport on my way to Boston that this was intended to be a “closed session.” The organizers asked participants not to contact any media outlets or...

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the period when the conceptual framework of the “state of nature” reshaped moral, legal and political philosophy —European forests, new technologies for extracting carbon traces from arctic ice reveal, were taken down at the fastest rate to date. 1 The great forests largely turned into cropland and fuel prior to wood’s replacement with coal as Europe’s main source of energy, and the colonial economy’s appetite for ships finished off the...

If we contemplate any natural object, especially any part of animated nature, fully and in all its bearings, we can arrive only at this conclusion: that there is design in the mechanical construction, benevolence shown in the living properties, and that good predominates: we shall perceive that the sensibilities of the body have a relation to the qualities of things external, and that delicacy of texture is a necessary consequence of this relation.
—Charles Bell 1
Scottish...

I’ve long thought that conventional understandings of geography were a little too “horizontal”. That geographical concepts such as production, uneven development, territory, scale, geopolitics and the like tended to be theorized on an assumed horizontal plane of human existence makes sense, because the vast majority of human activity does more-or-less conform to the relatively narrow vertical band on the earth’s surface that can support human life. But human infrastructures and activities...

This “space of Otherness” line of nonhomogeneity had then functioned to validate the socio-ontological line now drawn between rational, political Man (Prospero, the settler of European descent) and its irrational Human Others (the categories of Caliban [i.e. subordinated Indians and the enslaved Negroes])…
—Sylvia Wynter 1
In 2014 the San Francisco-based Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR) requested the American Institute of Architects (AIA) to...

Apparently nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human being—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.
—Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees” 1
Humanitarianism is often posed as a “practice of humanity”: an ensemble of forms of care that protect a notionally universal “human.” But who or what is the humanitarian human? Might the humanitarian protection of humanity also involve a production...

The idea of self-design is a paradox. Or, to put it more accurately, the idea of self-design will be a paradox if the self involved is understood as either too unified or too heterogeneous. If you want the concept to work, you need to articulate the self into an agent capable of taking on the verb “to design,” a target for her labor, and a relatively coherent object that emerges at the end. Even so, paradox lingers. The self that emerges should merge back into the very agent who is doing the...

It is probably a mistake to elevate those attributes of the homo sapiens nervous system that long for the right answer, the unified field, the elementary particle, or the universal truth. These beliefs are present not only in formalized philosophies, religions and political regimes of the human, but at the heart of the human’s daily activities. Some cerebral constructs—the most immaterial and ephemeral of all the body’s inventions—ossify into cast-iron closed loops of logical thinking that...

The field of design has radically expanded. As a practice, design is no longer limited to the world of material objects, but rather extends from carefully crafted individual looks and online identities, to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes. Our new publication, entitled Superhumanity, aims to probe the idea that we are and always have been continuously reshaped by the...

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Notes - Amplified Humanity and the Architectural Criminal

1

Protecting Cultural Heritage: An Imperative for Humanity, United Nations Brochure (22 September 2016), produced on the occasion of the “high-level meeting” at the United Nations, 10.

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2

Vandalism on the world stage is nothing new, nor is its prosecution as a violation of international norms. A crucial precedent was set by the International Tribunal established in the aftermath of the Balkan wars, which tried and convicted criminals for “intentional cultural destruction.” But the Dayton Accords this Tribunal enforced pertained only to one conflict, conscribed in space and time. On this, see Andrew Herscher, Violence Taking Place (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). In contrast, the International Criminal Court prosecuted Al Mahdi for his violation of a prohibition against “intentionally targeting cultural sites” that makes up Article 8 of the Rome Statute, an agreement that originates in a 1998 agreement to establish a permanent international judiciary.

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Among those pushing for this bridging are journalists such as Robert Bevan, “Attacks on Culture to be Crimes against Humanity,” The Art Newspaper (27 September 2016) and scholars such as Stener Ekern, William Logan, Birgitte Sauge, and Amund Sinding-Larsen, “Human rights and World Heritage: preserving our common dignity through rights-based approaches to site management” International Journal Of Heritage Studies 18/3 (2012), 214-354. In Africa, the phrase “crime against world heritage” has been circulated; see Slimane Zeghidour, “Crime contre le patrimoine de l’humanité” in TV5 Monde (11 March 2015) →. In Western elite preservation circles, the two terms have also been cross-pollinated, as when Renzo Piano’s addition to a building by Le Corbusier was called a “crime against humanity.” Michael Z. Wise, “Confrontation at Art Museums,” ArtNews (29 October 2014). The film version of Bevan’s book The Destruction of Memory (dir. Tim Slade, 2014) features a number of international figures arguing for new “conjoining” heritage and humanitarian law. Most prominently UNESCO Secretary General Irina Bokova declares “You don’t choose between lives and monuments because it’s about identity.” On the differentiation between humanism and humanitarianism in the construction of international architectural heritage value, see Lucia Allais, “This criterion should preferably be used in conjunction with other criteria,” Grey Room 61 (Fall 2015): 92-101.

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Rafael Lemkin, the author of the Genocide Convention, originally included “vandalism” in his definition of genocide but dropped this aspect when it threatened the passage of the convention. See A. Dirk Moses, “Raphael Lemkin, Culture, and the Concept of Genocide,” in Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (Oxford: University Press, 2012).

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5

International Criminal Court, Summary of the Judgment and Sentence in the case of The Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi (26 September 2016), 10.

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6

This is a distinction reiterated in 1938 by Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” (1938) reprinted in Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 1–2.

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7

The prevalence of video evidence was a factor in the court’s decision to take on the Al Mahdi case for cultural property crime alone, producing what Foreign policy calls “an evidentiary slam-dunk” →. But it was his confession that established the “gravity” of the crime and its punishment.

Far from a tabula rasa, the landscapes of destruction that increasingly patched the globe after the first world war were shaped around architectural objects that had been designated for survival, singled out for reconstruction, or both. This history of monument survival is the subject of my forthcoming book, Designs of Destruction: Monument Survival and internationalism in the 20th Century.

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Faisal Devji, “A Life on the Surface,” 21 September 2015, Hurst Publishing →.

Like many other groups in the Sahel, Ansar Dine has shifting alliances within global terror networks. At the time of the destruction it was allied with Al Qaeda, but also also hosted recruiters and preachers coming through Timbuktu from a constellation of other groups. ISIS’s cultural targeting became systematic in Mosul in June 2014, when the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shām issued a “Charter of the City” announcing that “all shrines and mausoleums” would be razed. Cited in Aaron Zelin, “The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria Has a Consumer Protection Office” The Atlantic (13 June 2014)

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In “Between Cult and Culture: Bamiyan, Islamic Iconoclasm, and the Museum Author(s) The Art Bulletin, 84/ No. 4 (Dec., 2002), pp. 641–659, Finbar Barry Flood already critiqued the essentialist view of Muslim iconoclasm as a cultural pathology by inscribing the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddahs within tropes of global modernity, especially as a response to the “hypocrisy of Western institutions.” I wish to thank Byron Hamman for reminding me of this seminal article and for thoughtful comments on a draft of my own text as well.

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Ansar Dine’s monitoring and patrolling of the sites was one reason for the UN’s decision to place them on the list of endangered cultural property. United Nations Press release, “Mali site added to List of World Heritage in Danger – UNESCO,” 13 July 2012 →. The ICC also noted that the destruction was a response to the initiatives of the Malian ministry of culture begun in 2013.

“Les Islamistes poursuivent la destruction des monuments de Tombouctou,” L’express with AFP (1 July 2012) →. These citations were made to Agence-France-Presse over the phone, reported widely (see for instance “A Tombouctou, les islamistes détruisent les mausolées musulmans,” Le Monde with AFP (30 June 2012) →. This citation is from the ICC’s own “unofficial internal translation” for the video MLI-OTP-0034-0395: “Our reference is not to international law, nor the United Nations, nor UNESCO … These international bodies … don’t concern us, and for us their indignation is an atonement … What is the value of these walls?” See also an interview of Sanda Ould Boumama by Marie-Pierre Olphand of RFI, “Mali: la destruction des mausolées de Tombouctou par Ansar Dine sème la consternation,” (10 November 2013), which became evidence MLI-OTP-0007-0228, and MLI-OTP-0020-0584.

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These videos, which serve as the core evidence in the ICC’s case against Al Mahdi, were shown in an elaborate multimedia presentation during trial. Originally they were recorded by a Mauriantian videographer, Ethnam Ag Mohamed Ethman who was embedded with Ansar Dine for months. Ethman periodically broadcast them on Saharamedia (for example, for June 20, 2012 →) Eventually they were acquired by producers and reporters from France 2, and broadcast in Envoyé Spécial on January 31, 2013 as part of the report Mali:La vie sous le régime islamiste” →. Henceforth Envoyé Spécial

Envoyé Spécial 14:00—14:30. Translation from original Arabic by Leen Katrib.

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“The door was condemned and bricked up. Over time, a myth took hold, claiming that the Day of Resurrection would begin if the door were opened. We fear that these myths will invade the beliefs of people and the ignorant who, because of their ignorance and their distance from religion, will think that this is the truth. So we decided to open it.” Cited in Trial Chamber VII, Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, Public Judgement and Sentence, (ICC-01/12-01/15-171), 22.

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In response to the question, “have you changed your religious conviction?”, Al Mahdi replies: “If you review my former statements, you will see that I was not convinced originally with the appropriateness to undertake such actions from the beginning because the decisions I had made were made on the basis of a legal decision. I said that what I did was based on a theory according to which one cannot build anything on tombs, and a tomb, according to the religious beliefs, should not be over 1 inch above the ground, and those mausoleums are far higher than that. (…) But from a legal and political viewpoint one should not undertake actions that will cause damage that is higher or more severe than the usefulness of the action. Such mausoleums I believe are not as harmful as the contradiction they represent as they are built on tombs, but the people who controlled the country at the time considered that such. (…) Thus, I believe that by doing that I do not change my beliefs, I should not undertake action that will cause damage to others. This is a former belief and a present belief of mine, sir.” Trial Chamber VIII, Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, Transcript, 23 August 2016 (ICC-01/12-01/15-T-4-Red-ENG), 13.

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“We are not here to decide on the fate of the author of single act of vandalism, but to render justice to memory and affirm the importance of symbol in the existence of a people.” Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, Transcript, 24 August 2016. “His role as media spokesperson in justifying the attack” is from Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, Public Judgement and Sentence, 27 September 2016, 39-42.

The English translation and transcription is Prosecution v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, Transcript, 23 August 2016 (ICC-01/12-01/15-T-4-Red-ENG), 8–9. The French is ICC-01/12-01/15-T-4-Red-FRA. This and following quotations of Al Mahdi’s statement are re-translated by Leen Katrib from the Arabic video, not transcribed but made available by the court as “In the Courtroom Programme” →.

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Also critical to Al Mahdi’s performance as an international witness was the somewhat belabored procedure of his choosing a language for the trial. Being asked which language he preferred, al Mahdi chose Arabic, indicating his exo-graphic affinity is with global Islam rather than, the State of Mali whose official language is French. When he indicated this choice through his lawyer, however, the presiding judge replied that he should have spoken this choice himself. Once al Mahdi obliged, the judge then ensured an Arabic simultaneous translator, and asked all parties not speaking Arabic to pause periodically to allow this interpreter to keep up with proceedings.

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33

“This is how deep the connection is between the mausoleums and the people of Timbuktu … to erase an element of collective identity.” Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, Transcript, 22 August 2016, 21.

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34

Ibid.

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35

“He acted with the requisite degree of knowledge. He knew that the buildings targeted were dedicated to religion and had a historic character and did not constitute military objective” Trial Chamber VIII, Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, Confirmation of Charges Hearing, 24 March 2015, (CR2016_02424), 25.

“These monuments, your Honours, were living testimony to Timbuktu's glorious past … a unique testament to the city's urban settlements. But above all they were the embodiment of Malian history, captured in tangible form from an era long gone yet still very much vivid in the memory and pride of the people who so dearly cherished them.” Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi Trial Hearing Transcript, 22 August 2016, (CR2016_05767), 17

The prosecution argued that the “multiple victims” aggravated the crime, while the chamber countered that it had “already taken into account the far-reaching nature of the crime.” “World Heritage” status means that the crime “not only affects the direct victims of the crimes (namely, the faithful and inhabitants of Timbuktu) but also people throughout Mali and the international community.” Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi Transcript 24 August 2016 (“CR2-16_05730”).

I take inspiration here from Brian Larkin’s description of the mediality of the loudspeaker in Jos, Nigeria, a city where both daily life and conflict are, as in Timbuktu, mediated through techniques and technologies for attention and inattention. Brian Larkin, “Techniques of Inattention: the Mediality of Loudspeakers in Nigeria,” in Anthropological Quarterly 87(4), 989-1016.

Francesco Bandarin’s testimony at the ICC notably weaves together three themes of Timbuktu’s architecture to argue for its multivalent historical value: a site of material know-how, of religious aura, and an urban network that is a “focus point for religious life, the region… and focus for pilgrimage” Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi Transcript, 23 August 2016, 44.

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Even Timbuktu’s famous manuscripts, which had been meticulously digitized before 2010, have been re-released into networks of global mobility. Originally housed in new museums on site, they were smuggled to Bamako before Al Mahdi’s group was able to get to them, thanks to a network of globally-trained curators, funded in part by a Ford Foundation grant. These funds had originally been granted in a “multidimensional and integrated United Nations initiative for stabilization” (MIUNIS) to Abdel Kader Haidara, a collector and librarian in Timbuktu, to conserve these manuscripts on site. They were officially diverted to help for the secret removal of these objects to Bamako by boat and car. “Trois Bibliothèques de manuscripts anciens réhabilitées à Tombouctou,” UN Press Release (1 December 2015) →.

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On this history see Mary Jo Arnoldi, “Cultural Patrimony and Heritage Management in Mali” in Africa Today 61/1, (Fall 2014), pp. 47-67

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On Timbuktu as a warscape see Fiona McLaughlin, “Linguistic warscapes of northern Mali,” in Linguistic Landscapes 1:3 (2015), 213-242.

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On the use of these rituals in post-war reconciliation in both Timbuktu and Gao see Thierry Joffroy and Ali Ould Sidi, “Stratégie de reconstruction du Patrimoine Culturel détruit ou endommagé des regions du nord du Mali,” in Mali, post-crise: de nouvelles perpsectives pour le patrimoine (Paris: Riveneuve, 2015), 337-350. “Noble Pile” is from a description of one of the towers of the Djingareiber mosque by Heinrich Barth, Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa 1849-1845 a Vol, III. (London: Frank Cass & Co, 1965), 323.

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Daniel Monk and Jacob Mundy have described the post-conflict environment as an ideological construct, a “reification” that helps to realize the interventionist habitus of the liberal international community. Daniel B. Monk and Jacob Mundy, “Conclusion,” in The Post-Conflict Environment (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,2014), 219. While theirs is a critique primarily of statebuilding practices, it applies equally to softer cultural forms of post-conflict pacification such as the ones operated in Timbuktu, where urban heritage is reified along with the humanity that is produced in its defense.

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Bensouda argued during the trial that “attacks on religious property are usually the precursors to the worse outrages against population” and therefore cultural punishment was “an integral part of humanitarian efforts.” Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi Transcript, 22 August 2016, 21. She is a vocal proponent of the use of the ICC to prosecute “sexual violence in conflict.” Esther Addley, “Fatou Bensouda, the woman who hunts tyrants,” The Guardian (5 June 2016) →. The idea of cultural violence “signaling” the presence of other human rights violations, and of the ICC trial “signaling” international policing in return, is articulated by Patty Gerstenblith and Bonnie Burnham in The Destruction of Memory. Raphael Lemkin himself wrote in 1923 that “physical and biological genocide are always preceded by attacks on cultural symbols.” Moses, Op Cit, 41.

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See Laura Kurgan’s ongoing work to “document and narrate” the urban damage in the Syrian city of Aleppo, Conflict Urbanism→, and Eyal Weizman’s group’s work, collected in Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014).

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Protecting Cultural Heritage: An Imperative for Humanity, United Nations Brochure (22 September 2016), produced on the occasion of the “high-level meeting” at the United Nations, 10.

Vandalism on the world stage is nothing new, nor is its prosecution as a violation of international norms. A crucial precedent was set by the International Tribunal established in the aftermath of the Balkan wars, which tried and convicted criminals for “intentional cultural destruction.” But the Dayton Accords this Tribunal enforced pertained only to one conflict, conscribed in space and time. On this, see Andrew Herscher, Violence Taking Place (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). In contrast, the International Criminal Court prosecuted Al Mahdi for his violation of a prohibition against “intentionally targeting cultural sites” that makes up Article 8 of the Rome Statute, an agreement that originates in a 1998 agreement to establish a permanent international judiciary.

Among those pushing for this bridging are journalists such as Robert Bevan, “Attacks on Culture to be Crimes against Humanity,” The Art Newspaper (27 September 2016) and scholars such as Stener Ekern, William Logan, Birgitte Sauge, and Amund Sinding-Larsen, “Human rights and World Heritage: preserving our common dignity through rights-based approaches to site management” International Journal Of Heritage Studies 18/3 (2012), 214-354. In Africa, the phrase “crime against world heritage” has been circulated; see Slimane Zeghidour, “Crime contre le patrimoine de l’humanité” in TV5 Monde (11 March 2015) →. In Western elite preservation circles, the two terms have also been cross-pollinated, as when Renzo Piano’s addition to a building by Le Corbusier was called a “crime against humanity.” Michael Z. Wise, “Confrontation at Art Museums,” ArtNews (29 October 2014). The film version of Bevan’s book The Destruction of Memory (dir. Tim Slade, 2014) features a number of international figures arguing for new “conjoining” heritage and humanitarian law. Most prominently UNESCO Secretary General Irina Bokova declares “You don’t choose between lives and monuments because it’s about identity.” On the differentiation between humanism and humanitarianism in the construction of international architectural heritage value, see Lucia Allais, “This criterion should preferably be used in conjunction with other criteria,” Grey Room 61 (Fall 2015): 92-101.

Rafael Lemkin, the author of the Genocide Convention, originally included “vandalism” in his definition of genocide but dropped this aspect when it threatened the passage of the convention. See A. Dirk Moses, “Raphael Lemkin, Culture, and the Concept of Genocide,” in Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (Oxford: University Press, 2012).

International Criminal Court, Summary of the Judgment and Sentence in the case of The Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi (26 September 2016), 10.

This is a distinction reiterated in 1938 by Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” (1938) reprinted in Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 1–2.

The prevalence of video evidence was a factor in the court’s decision to take on the Al Mahdi case for cultural property crime alone, producing what Foreign policy calls “an evidentiary slam-dunk” →. But it was his confession that established the “gravity” of the crime and its punishment.

Far from a tabula rasa, the landscapes of destruction that increasingly patched the globe after the first world war were shaped around architectural objects that had been designated for survival, singled out for reconstruction, or both. This history of monument survival is the subject of my forthcoming book, Designs of Destruction: Monument Survival and internationalism in the 20th Century.

Faisal Devji, “A Life on the Surface,” 21 September 2015, Hurst Publishing →.

Like many other groups in the Sahel, Ansar Dine has shifting alliances within global terror networks. At the time of the destruction it was allied with Al Qaeda, but also also hosted recruiters and preachers coming through Timbuktu from a constellation of other groups. ISIS’s cultural targeting became systematic in Mosul in June 2014, when the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shām issued a “Charter of the City” announcing that “all shrines and mausoleums” would be razed. Cited in Aaron Zelin, “The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria Has a Consumer Protection Office” The Atlantic (13 June 2014)

In “Between Cult and Culture: Bamiyan, Islamic Iconoclasm, and the Museum Author(s) The Art Bulletin, 84/ No. 4 (Dec., 2002), pp. 641–659, Finbar Barry Flood already critiqued the essentialist view of Muslim iconoclasm as a cultural pathology by inscribing the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddahs within tropes of global modernity, especially as a response to the “hypocrisy of Western institutions.” I wish to thank Byron Hamman for reminding me of this seminal article and for thoughtful comments on a draft of my own text as well.

Ansar Dine’s monitoring and patrolling of the sites was one reason for the UN’s decision to place them on the list of endangered cultural property. United Nations Press release, “Mali site added to List of World Heritage in Danger – UNESCO,” 13 July 2012 →. The ICC also noted that the destruction was a response to the initiatives of the Malian ministry of culture begun in 2013.

“Les Islamistes poursuivent la destruction des monuments de Tombouctou,” L’express with AFP (1 July 2012) →. These citations were made to Agence-France-Presse over the phone, reported widely (see for instance “A Tombouctou, les islamistes détruisent les mausolées musulmans,” Le Monde with AFP (30 June 2012) →. This citation is from the ICC’s own “unofficial internal translation” for the video MLI-OTP-0034-0395: “Our reference is not to international law, nor the United Nations, nor UNESCO … These international bodies … don’t concern us, and for us their indignation is an atonement … What is the value of these walls?” See also an interview of Sanda Ould Boumama by Marie-Pierre Olphand of RFI, “Mali: la destruction des mausolées de Tombouctou par Ansar Dine sème la consternation,” (10 November 2013), which became evidence MLI-OTP-0007-0228, and MLI-OTP-0020-0584.

These videos, which serve as the core evidence in the ICC’s case against Al Mahdi, were shown in an elaborate multimedia presentation during trial. Originally they were recorded by a Mauriantian videographer, Ethnam Ag Mohamed Ethman who was embedded with Ansar Dine for months. Ethman periodically broadcast them on Saharamedia (for example, for June 20, 2012 →) Eventually they were acquired by producers and reporters from France 2, and broadcast in Envoyé Spécial on January 31, 2013 as part of the report Mali:La vie sous le régime islamiste” →. Henceforth Envoyé Spécial

Envoyé Spécial 14:00—14:30. Translation from original Arabic by Leen Katrib.

“The door was condemned and bricked up. Over time, a myth took hold, claiming that the Day of Resurrection would begin if the door were opened. We fear that these myths will invade the beliefs of people and the ignorant who, because of their ignorance and their distance from religion, will think that this is the truth. So we decided to open it.” Cited in Trial Chamber VII, Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, Public Judgement and Sentence, (ICC-01/12-01/15-171), 22.

In response to the question, “have you changed your religious conviction?”, Al Mahdi replies: “If you review my former statements, you will see that I was not convinced originally with the appropriateness to undertake such actions from the beginning because the decisions I had made were made on the basis of a legal decision. I said that what I did was based on a theory according to which one cannot build anything on tombs, and a tomb, according to the religious beliefs, should not be over 1 inch above the ground, and those mausoleums are far higher than that. (…) But from a legal and political viewpoint one should not undertake actions that will cause damage that is higher or more severe than the usefulness of the action. Such mausoleums I believe are not as harmful as the contradiction they represent as they are built on tombs, but the people who controlled the country at the time considered that such. (…) Thus, I believe that by doing that I do not change my beliefs, I should not undertake action that will cause damage to others. This is a former belief and a present belief of mine, sir.” Trial Chamber VIII, Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, Transcript, 23 August 2016 (ICC-01/12-01/15-T-4-Red-ENG), 13.

“We are not here to decide on the fate of the author of single act of vandalism, but to render justice to memory and affirm the importance of symbol in the existence of a people.” Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, Transcript, 24 August 2016. “His role as media spokesperson in justifying the attack” is from Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, Public Judgement and Sentence, 27 September 2016, 39-42.

The English translation and transcription is Prosecution v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, Transcript, 23 August 2016 (ICC-01/12-01/15-T-4-Red-ENG), 8–9. The French is ICC-01/12-01/15-T-4-Red-FRA. This and following quotations of Al Mahdi’s statement are re-translated by Leen Katrib from the Arabic video, not transcribed but made available by the court as “In the Courtroom Programme” →.

Also critical to Al Mahdi’s performance as an international witness was the somewhat belabored procedure of his choosing a language for the trial. Being asked which language he preferred, al Mahdi chose Arabic, indicating his exo-graphic affinity is with global Islam rather than, the State of Mali whose official language is French. When he indicated this choice through his lawyer, however, the presiding judge replied that he should have spoken this choice himself. Once al Mahdi obliged, the judge then ensured an Arabic simultaneous translator, and asked all parties not speaking Arabic to pause periodically to allow this interpreter to keep up with proceedings.

“This is how deep the connection is between the mausoleums and the people of Timbuktu … to erase an element of collective identity.” Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, Transcript, 22 August 2016, 21.

Ibid.

“He acted with the requisite degree of knowledge. He knew that the buildings targeted were dedicated to religion and had a historic character and did not constitute military objective” Trial Chamber VIII, Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, Confirmation of Charges Hearing, 24 March 2015, (CR2016_02424), 25.

“These monuments, your Honours, were living testimony to Timbuktu's glorious past … a unique testament to the city's urban settlements. But above all they were the embodiment of Malian history, captured in tangible form from an era long gone yet still very much vivid in the memory and pride of the people who so dearly cherished them.” Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi Trial Hearing Transcript, 22 August 2016, (CR2016_05767), 17

The prosecution argued that the “multiple victims” aggravated the crime, while the chamber countered that it had “already taken into account the far-reaching nature of the crime.” “World Heritage” status means that the crime “not only affects the direct victims of the crimes (namely, the faithful and inhabitants of Timbuktu) but also people throughout Mali and the international community.” Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi Transcript 24 August 2016 (“CR2-16_05730”).

I take inspiration here from Brian Larkin’s description of the mediality of the loudspeaker in Jos, Nigeria, a city where both daily life and conflict are, as in Timbuktu, mediated through techniques and technologies for attention and inattention. Brian Larkin, “Techniques of Inattention: the Mediality of Loudspeakers in Nigeria,” in Anthropological Quarterly 87(4), 989-1016.

Francesco Bandarin’s testimony at the ICC notably weaves together three themes of Timbuktu’s architecture to argue for its multivalent historical value: a site of material know-how, of religious aura, and an urban network that is a “focus point for religious life, the region… and focus for pilgrimage” Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi Transcript, 23 August 2016, 44.

Even Timbuktu’s famous manuscripts, which had been meticulously digitized before 2010, have been re-released into networks of global mobility. Originally housed in new museums on site, they were smuggled to Bamako before Al Mahdi’s group was able to get to them, thanks to a network of globally-trained curators, funded in part by a Ford Foundation grant. These funds had originally been granted in a “multidimensional and integrated United Nations initiative for stabilization” (MIUNIS) to Abdel Kader Haidara, a collector and librarian in Timbuktu, to conserve these manuscripts on site. They were officially diverted to help for the secret removal of these objects to Bamako by boat and car. “Trois Bibliothèques de manuscripts anciens réhabilitées à Tombouctou,” UN Press Release (1 December 2015) →.

On this history see Mary Jo Arnoldi, “Cultural Patrimony and Heritage Management in Mali” in Africa Today 61/1, (Fall 2014), pp. 47-67

On Timbuktu as a warscape see Fiona McLaughlin, “Linguistic warscapes of northern Mali,” in Linguistic Landscapes 1:3 (2015), 213-242.

On the use of these rituals in post-war reconciliation in both Timbuktu and Gao see Thierry Joffroy and Ali Ould Sidi, “Stratégie de reconstruction du Patrimoine Culturel détruit ou endommagé des regions du nord du Mali,” in Mali, post-crise: de nouvelles perpsectives pour le patrimoine (Paris: Riveneuve, 2015), 337-350. “Noble Pile” is from a description of one of the towers of the Djingareiber mosque by Heinrich Barth, Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa 1849-1845 a Vol, III. (London: Frank Cass & Co, 1965), 323.

Daniel Monk and Jacob Mundy have described the post-conflict environment as an ideological construct, a “reification” that helps to realize the interventionist habitus of the liberal international community. Daniel B. Monk and Jacob Mundy, “Conclusion,” in The Post-Conflict Environment (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,2014), 219. While theirs is a critique primarily of statebuilding practices, it applies equally to softer cultural forms of post-conflict pacification such as the ones operated in Timbuktu, where urban heritage is reified along with the humanity that is produced in its defense.

Bensouda argued during the trial that “attacks on religious property are usually the precursors to the worse outrages against population” and therefore cultural punishment was “an integral part of humanitarian efforts.” Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi Transcript, 22 August 2016, 21. She is a vocal proponent of the use of the ICC to prosecute “sexual violence in conflict.” Esther Addley, “Fatou Bensouda, the woman who hunts tyrants,” The Guardian (5 June 2016) →. The idea of cultural violence “signaling” the presence of other human rights violations, and of the ICC trial “signaling” international policing in return, is articulated by Patty Gerstenblith and Bonnie Burnham in The Destruction of Memory. Raphael Lemkin himself wrote in 1923 that “physical and biological genocide are always preceded by attacks on cultural symbols.” Moses, Op Cit, 41.

See Laura Kurgan’s ongoing work to “document and narrate” the urban damage in the Syrian city of Aleppo, Conflict Urbanism→, and Eyal Weizman’s group’s work, collected in Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014).

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